Just because problems appear intractable, it doesn’t mean that the Government
shouldn’t try to fix them.

The Tricycle Theatre in north London has long prided itself on conducting inquiries when the government refuses to. Its latest production, The Riots, is an unlikely triumph. It has a script distilled from more than 50 hours of interviews with policemen, politicians and prisoners, who are all represented on stage delivering their own, very different accounts of those few days in August when it felt like Britain was being set ablaze. The Michael Gove character is especially convincing, if only because the Education Secretary always talks as if he were acting out a cleverly worded play. The production’s conclusion is that there is no conclusion. Which extends beyond the stage, too. Even now, nothing like a consensus has been reached.

But the play has been commissioned on a false premise. A government inquiry is, in fact, in progress – not that anyone has noticed. The Riots Communities and Victims Panel is due to report next week, to the surprise of most in Westminster, who had no idea that it had been set up in the first place. David Cameron didn’t want an inquiry and Nick Clegg did, so their compromise was a pretty low-quality investigation that is expected to add nothing to our greater understanding.

Anyway, politics has moved on. The question of what caused the riots has mutated into a consideration of the wider evil of youth unemployment – which, I understand, will be the focus of George Osborne’s Autumn Statement next week. The Chancellor is toying with various ideas, chief among them being a National Insurance holiday for those who move from welfare into work. Treasury civil servants are anxious about even this, so the scheme may be limited to the under-25s. Almost half of the convicted rioters were over 21, but the idea of finding a solution to the problems behind the riots is draining as quickly as general interest in the subject itself.

In fact, it took less than a month for the subject to virtually vanish from public debate. At the time, Iain Duncan Smith said they would change David Cameron’s premiership as much as the September 11 attacks had changed Tony Blair’s. But a new crisis always comes along to supplant the old one. The riots proved to be a political burp: deeply embarrassing at the time, but now forgotten. Also, the problems which gave rise to them are among the most intractable in British politics. As they say in Whitehall: if you can’t fix it, it ain’t broke.

Outside Whitehall, it is all too clear what has broken. Thousands of pieces of evidence have steadily streamed in, debunking the idea that Britain has just seen its own Los Angeles-style racial war. While Nick Clegg was yesterday detecting all manner of racial prejudice in our society, the truth is that Britain has become perhaps the most tolerant country in Europe. British gangs tend to reflect the ethnic mix of their communities – as, by and large, did the rioters. It is a strange advert for British race relations: ebony and ivory, looting in perfect harmony.

Attempts to link the riots to the recession have also failed. It is true that in Tottenham Hale, where the riots started, a scandalous 23 per cent were on out-of-work benefits this summer. But the greater scandal is that the figure was the same at the height of the boom, four years ago. In Toxteth, the centre of Liverpool’s riots, the figure is 40 per cent (again unaffected by the recession). The devil may well make work for idle hands, but it’s not the recession which is rendering them idle. The police are certainly culpable for their catastrophic handling of the events. But a problem repressed is not a problem solved.

There have now been dozens of mini-inquiries, from everyone from the Metropolitan Police to Harriet Harman. But the most surprising and thought-provoking analysis has come from David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham. His book, Out of the Ashes, was published yesterday and is completely free from the usual political jargon. Lammy, of course, didn’t learn about poverty from the sort of textbooks which insulate the walls of his colleagues’ offices. He draws from his own background: a black boy raised in Tottenham by a single mother. Many born into similar circumstances do indeed go to prison: Lammy went to Harvard and the House of Commons.

He is unafraid to talk about the crucial importance of fathers, and the problem of their absence – no small issue in a country where one in four children grows up in a lone parent household. He says that his Labour colleagues have been so keen to champion the cause of single mothers that they overlook how young men can now grow up here without any meaningful contact with a working man, while the subversive forces of gang culture are stronger than ever. Lammy then moves from outspoken boldness to career-ending bravery by describing how the Church – and the influence of religion – has a crucial role to play in keeping young men out of rioters’ way.

The Church of England has failed to offer any meaningful response to the riots, a stunning dereliction of duty. Lammy’s problem with the Church is that it is preoccupied with the wrong subjects. It has saddened him, he says, to see it caught up in “pretty tangential subjects” such as “women priests, gay marriage and gay bishops”.

All this may be enough to have Lammy charged with heresy against Labour’s revered secularity. But he is one of a handful of MPs who are able to talk from experience about growing up on the crime-ridden estates where so many young people are now trapped. His fearless book could well mark a turning-point for the Labour Party. Ed Miliband has a famously voracious appetite for facts, figures and think tank reports – but this is precisely what blinded his predecessor to the nature of poverty in Britain. At some point, Gordon Brown stopped seeing poverty as a human issue, and started to see it as a statistical game which could be played with tax credits.

While Brown spent billions on his great spreadsheet puzzler, those too poor to be nudged above his arbitrary poverty threshold were abandoned. The poorest grew poorer; their schools were left to rot. Those teenagers who have been imprisoned for the riots were all educated under Labour. In London, almost all of those detained had left, or dropped out of school without five decent GCSEs – and walked into an economy that has precious little use for them.

Miliband would do well to buy a ticket for The Riots, if only to remind himself that this problem is – fundamentally – all about people, not money. Relationships and education matter far more than handouts. Lammy’s analysis is born from experience: it is hardly Right-wing to say that the two-parent family is the first, best and cheapest source of health, wealth and education. Iain Duncan Smith could not be less party political on this issue, and David Blunkett and Frank Field sit on the advisory board of his Centre for Social Justice (as do I). The issue of British poverty is one where the labels “Left” and “Right” seem redundant.

The issue splits political parties. There are Conservatives who think that better policing is the answer, just as there are Labour MPs who prescribe more welfare. But the riots were an invitation to see things differently, to look at families and how government bankrolls their break-up. They were a reminder that radical welfare reform can only really be done with a cross-party consensus. But for that, one needs a sense of urgency. Without it, the Tricycle Theatre should prepare itself for a rerun – because the conditions for the riots of 2012 are already in place.